“It’s the most wonderful time of the year…”

I can’t really call myself a “blogger” if I don’t write about what happened during the holidays, can I? But wait, gentle reader! This time, there’s actually something exciting to write about! (Too many exciting things to write about, actually.)

Because of my sister’s schedule, we didn’t celebrate Christmas on the 25^th, at the serna household. Instead, we celebrated on Boxing Day. But Andrea and I went home Christmas Day anyway, and enjoyed a pleasant dinner with my parents. (Chili. Mmm!) However, my sister and her boyfriend got home late in the evening on Christmas Day, and we elected to go ahead and open our presents right away, instead of waiting for Boxing Day, as had previously been the plan.

I got a bunch of good stuff, which I won’t bother to list out here. Suffice it to say that my parents spoil me more than they should.

On Boxing Day, the rest of the family came over. (My grandmother, uncle, and cousins.) We opened some more presents, and then had a great Christmas dinner. (Turkey, stuffing, ham, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, all the usual stuff that you’d find at a Christmas dinner—at least, in my culture.)

That night, after all of my relatives had left, Andrea and I went over to visit Jer, T, and Alexis, and while we where there, Beth stopped by, so it was nice to see her, too.

Here’s where the exciting stuff starts to happen. Luckily for me, it starts out from very mildly exciting, and each new exciting thing that happens is a bit more exciting than the previous thing. As a writer, that has a nice flow to it—although if it were fiction, it would feel a bit contrived.

Exciting thing #1: We started playing the CSI: Miami board game. I’ve heard numerous people—too numerous to mention—tell me that out of all the CSI shows, they hate Miami the most. It turns out that applies to the board game, too; it sucked pretty bad. By the end, we just wanted it to be over, so that we could move on and do something else. On the plus side, though, Beth got a new nickname: Bethamphetamine. (Or Crystal Beth, for short.) I’d explain why, but you really had to be there. Also, I forget. But it has something to do with the dead brother of the guy on CSI: Miami whom everyone hates.

Exciting thing #2: After the game, Jer and I sat down and talked about some things, which I didn’t really want to talk about, but you can’t really avoid some things, so we bit the bullet and discussed it. ’Nuff said.

Exciting thing #3: As we were talking, my cell phone rang, which was odd, because it was around midnight. Although I’m a computer nerd, and was once in the wireless sector, and have always kept myself so “plugged in” that anyone could get hold of me at any time of the day or night, the simple fact is that I’m not that popular, and my cell phone never rings after midnight. And this was the one occasion that I didn’t have it on my person—for some reason, I decided to leave it upstairs, when I went downstairs to talk with Jer. “Oh well,” I thought. “If it’s that important, they’ll call back.”

It was my sister. It was important. She called back.

My step-father had been rushed to the hospital, and Mom was there with him. We were to get to the hospital ASAP, which wasn’t too hard for me, because Jer and T live right around the corner from the hospital. So Andrea and I rushed on over to the hospital, where I promptly lost a dollar into the parking metre, that I’ll never see again.

When we got there, the nurse brought us all to a waiting room, and a while later my mom came in, and told us what was going on. I’m honestly not sure how serious it was; it was heart problems, and he’d been brought in to the hospital numerous times before for the same thing. So, on the one hand, it seemed pretty routine, but on the other hand, it was heart problems, and he was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.

We stayed until around 3:00AM, and then most of us went back home, but Mom stayed for the night.

Exciting thing #4: The next day, which was the Wednesday, was a bit strange, because my step-dad was in the hospital. When Mom came back, in the morning, we all went out for breakfast, and then she got some sleep, before heading back to the hospital. That evening, we all met at the hospital again, and then went out for dinner, at Swiss Chalet. As my regular readers will know, Swiss Chalet is one of my favourite restaurants. Unfortunately, they tried to kill my wife and my brother-in-law, so I might not be going back there that often.

Ha! No, I kid. But they did get pretty serious food poisoning. Around 3:00AM, Andrea woke up because she needed to, ahem, expunge the poisoned food from her system, and I think she was, ahem, expunging it for the rest of the night.

We’d been planning to go home on Thursday, but because Andrea was laid up in bed the whole day, that plan was kind of thrown out the window. On the plus side, however, since we were staying an extra day, I was able to visit my step-father in the hospital once more, and I was able to stop by Future Shop and pick up a keyboard for my computer, at the Boxing Day sale.

On Friday, we came back to Toronto.

And that was my Christmas. Now, gentle reader, here is your challenge: If you have a blog, blog about your Christmas, and then put a comment here which links to your blog entry. (Hint: If you’ve already blogged about it, feel free to skip to step two; you don’t have to blog about it again, just to put the link here.) My Christmas was bizarre, so I’m wondering how everyone else’s was. Maybe bizarre Christmases is something that catches, like the flu. (Which, it turns out, most of my family has, right now. And a pretty virulent strain, which has—or had—them laid up in bed for a couple of days, including all of the relapses. I asked my mom who she’d angered, who had put a curse on our whole family, but she couldn’t think of anyone.)